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Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

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Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#261

Post by buttershakes »

j_bond wrote: post #237
rothbardrand wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are. There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visibl…

Serious question, why doesn't core switch hashing algorithms at the fork to something ASIC-resistant like Dagger-Hashimoto PoW. Seems like a win-win for them since they don't have to worry about the competitive faction causing havoc on their chain, the miners are more distributed, and there is an army of GPU hashing power that is looking for a place to direct their mining power towards with the Ethereum move to PoS o…

That's a really good question, it's because doing so would create an alt coin that isn't Bitcoin, and this is all about control of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#262

Post by olegkikin »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #104

I just moved ~20% of my crypto holdings from BTC to LTC. The rest I'll likely keep close to 40% of my cryptoholdings in BTC, but move it onto my own wallet. If a fork actually happens, I'd prefer to be in control of the private keys. It's kind of odd that there is still so much FUD about segwit, as it has already activated on LTC. It hasn't appeared to open any security holes.

Your private keys should be fine, no matter how the fork happens. In every scenario discussed everyone keeps their old coins, as far as I'm aware.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#263

Post by buttershakes »

jhall1468 wrote: post #247
buttershakes wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are ascribing to the Bitcoin core narrative of a bunch of freedom fighters who are building a decentralized future of freedom, but that narrative does not hold water. First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. That tells you that the allegianc…

> but that narrative does not hold water. Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his. > First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4)…

>I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied.

This always get's bandied about. There are less than 20 people responsible for the vast majority of the commits in the last year, the other 90+ are small scattered changes. Easy to verify, go look at the commit logs. Oh, and 3 of the top Contributors aren't even working on core anymore.

>SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now.

Segwit is all about sidechains, that's the main application, and the real purpose. Side chains mean transactions off chain. Transactions off chain mean less fees for Bitcoin miners. It's not rocket science. The only way they make it back is if the settlement costs become huge.

> That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes.

The reason nodes are expensive is because they are doing full historical validation which is almost completely useless and unnecessary. Minor changes to the Bitcoin block header would make that completely irrelevant. The nodes need all data ever argument is total junk.

>LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.

How much does it cost to open and close a channel on the main bitcoin blockchain at a 1 megabyte limit with millions of users? It's not a free thing, it's very expensive. To say that won't result in centralization is ridiculous. LN is not a solution without larger block sizes.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#264

Post by tkxxx7 »

hudon wrote: post #231
buttershakes wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well i consider trading a very valid use case, as well as simple peer to peer payment for all goods and services. How much transactional volume is Bitpay doing? 800,0000 isn't a big number, and certainly it will only represent a small portion of the payment volume if Bitcoin went anywhere near main stream. It's also pretty evident that Bitcoin may be censorship resistant but it isn't anonymous or fully fungible, make…

If you can show me that bitpay processes around the same amount as dark markets, I will re-assess my position... As for anonymity and fungibility: I believe tumbling services are good enough today, which is why buying on a dark market works. However, it is not perfect and this is why projects like Monero, ZCash, MimbleWimble, TumbleBit and Xim are important.

I'm sure a lot of those dark market coins are going through BitPay.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#265

Post by rocqua »

fpgaminer wrote: post #109
kinghajj wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever). The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?

AFAIK the paper is referring to thin clients, right? You can already run those with the stock Bitcoin Core client. There's a command line argument that tells it to prune any blocks older than X. The disk space required by such clients is X times the maximum size of blocks + the size of the UTXO. But you still need full nodes who maintain all historical data. Because, AFAIK, there's no way other way to trustlessly est…

I think perhaps a soft-fork is possible where you store a hash of the UTXO pool in e.g. the coinbase transaction. This way you can verify a given UTXO pool by just checking the hash.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#266

Post by jhall1468 »

buttershakes wrote: post #263
jhall1468 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that narrative does not hold water. Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his. > First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4)…

>I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied. This always get's bandied about. There are less than 20 people responsible for the vast majority of the commits in the last year, the other 90+ are small scattered changes. Easy to verify, go look at the commit logs. Oh, and 3 of the top Contributors aren…

> Segwit is all about sidechains, that's the main application, and the real purpose.

You're just wrong. Segwit is about a major malleability bug. It happens to open the way for sidechains, but do you honestly think we shouldn't fix the bug purely because it happens to make sidechains more feasible?

> Side chains mean transactions off chain. Transactions off chain mean less fees for Bitcoin miners. It's not rocket science.

Correct, but you don't seem to be following the problem the same way I am. Your major concern is how much miners get paid. My major concern is network adoption and decentralization. Pretending that your values are the only values is what makes your position distasteful.

> The reason nodes are expensive is because they are doing full historical validation which is almost completely useless and unnecessary. Minor changes to the Bitcoin block header would make that completely irrelevant. The nodes need all data ever argument is total junk.

You just literally dismissed how an open block chain works. If nodes don't have the entire history attacks become arbitrary.

> How much does it cost to open and close a channel on the main bitcoin blockchain at a 1 megabyte limit with millions of users? It's not a free thing, it's very expensive.

And guess whose in the best position to implement channels (and collect the fees associated with it)? miners.

> To say that won't result in centralization is ridiculous.

Less than would exist by big blocks.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#267

Post by FabHK »

ErikBjare wrote: post #232
jerguismi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This means their expected return is lower, not higher, they aren't getting a larger percentage of found blocks, and those blocks occur farther apart." The blocks would happen farther apart, but it would also mean that the remaining miners would have much higher change of actually finding a block, since there would be less competition. Also as there would be the same amount of transactions and less blocks, the blocks…

> The blocks would happen farther apart, but it would also mean that the remaining miners would have much higher change of actually finding a block, since there would be less competition. That's not true. The chance of finding a block is the same for every hash given a certain difficulty, regardless of competition. So a miner with a certain amount of hashing power will always have the same chance of finding a block u…

Seems to me GP is right:

The remaining miners make the same amount per day, until difficulty is adjusted, and then much more.

Consider this: one pool with 20% hash power. They only get every 5th block, i.e. 1 coinbase reward every 50 minutes.

Now all the other miners fall away. Now this pool will still take about 50 minutes to find a block, but it will get 100% of them, thus still being rewarded a block every 50 minutes.

However, 2 to 10 weeks later (depending when the last difficulty adjustment was) (or longer, if difficulty adjustment is capped), a block is found every 10 minutes again, and the pool gets 100% of them, thus 5 rewards in 50 minutes.

On the other hand, gp also said: > Also as there would be the same amount of transactions and less blocks, the blocks would have more collected transaction fees -> bigger reward.

If I understand correctly, that the hypothetical 20% mining pool would immediately get 100% rather than 20% of all transaction fees when the other miners fall away.

However, AFAIK the coinbase (mining reward) dwarfs the transaction fees (for now), so that should not be that relevant.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#268

Post by colordrops »

arcaster wrote: post #47

After working in the space for about a year, after being a developer and enthusiast surrounding crypto since the early days of BTC this "bickering among core devs" is nothing new. Any press or "talks" that say otherwise are either being influenced with serious bias or are simply reporting false information. I like DLT tech, however, if bitcoin has shown us anything it's that once you solve the double-spend problem yo…

BTC governance is already "solved". The point is that there is no inherent governance. "Civil wars" and forks are by design, not a problem.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#269

Post by xg15 »

flashdance wrote: post #208
xg15 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misinformed, but aren't SegWit (without 2x) blocks backwards compatible? From what I understood, a valid SegWit block will appear valid to an old client. Certain invalid SegWit blocks will also appear valid to old clients, but those blocks will be rejected by SegWit-enabled miners, so they have little chance to be included should the miners change.

> Maybe I'm misinformed, but aren't SegWit (without 2x) blocks backwards compatible? You're correct. However, I'm fairly sure OP was talking about Segwit (with 2x). If most users/exchanges/services don't get on board by the time the scheduled segwit2x hardfork happens, then those blocks would be considered invalid.

That makes sense. However from what I've read, the timeline is "SegWit -> multi-month transition period -> 2x HF".

So by the time the 2x fork comes up, the segwit-enabled chain will already be in use for several months.

Another point I'm wondering (sorry if that's a noob question) : Assume that some of the forks actually lead to a chain split with hashpower distributed 90%/10%.

At some point, the difficulty of the chains will adjust to bring both of them back to the "one block every 10 minutes" rate. However, this will not happen immediately but only when the current difficulty period would complete. Before that happens, the minority chain will still have the difficulty from before the split - the one that assumes 10x as much hash power as now is actually available. That sounds as if the minority chain could become effectively unminable for the rest of the difficulty period. Worse, as the period durations are measured in mined blocks, if blocks are mined slower, the difficulty period will also go on for a longer time.

Does that make any sense?

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#270

Post by colordrops »

nfriedly wrote: post #189

What is Bitcoin and friends good for right now besides speculating with and trading for other currencies? A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight). But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away. Actually: > Bitc…

It's great for those of us who are skeptical of central government control of currency.
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